12.23.2011

Small Press Traffic hosted an event curated by Barbara Jane Reyes, the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. Reyes was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Barbara began the afternoon by telling us of her own ambivalence about discussing ethnicity and poetics. She said she desired to deepen and make more complex the discussion around this intersection. She noted that sometimes a complex discussion is met with resistance. Sometimes avant-garde poetics is not discussed or tolerated within some sections of the APIA poetic community. Class also plays a role as Reyes noted that APIA poetry has its roots in a politics that seeks to speak to the masses. In this context, sometimes the avant-garde is perceived as being intellectual and abstract with political alignments outside of the APIA community. With this background and set of provocations, Barbara turned the discussion over to the panel.

Jai Arun Ravine started us off. Jai is an engaging young writer who communicated enthusiasm and a set of poetic and artistic practices and endeavors deeply engaged with the complexities of identities, particularly at the intersection of multiple trans-identities. Jai's blog describes Jai this way:

Jai Arun Ravine is a mixed race Thai American writer, dancer, video and performance artist. They received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies (English/Creative Writing, Dance, Asian Studies) from Hollins University. They are the author of แล้ว and then entwine (Tinfish Press, 2011), the chapbook Is This January (Corollary Press, 2010) and the graphic poem project The Spiderboi Files. A recipient of fellowships from ComPeung, Djerassi and Kundiman, their short experimental film Tom/Trans/Thai recently exhibited at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Thailand. Jai grew up in Charleston, West Virginia and is currently based in the San Francisco bay area. They are a 2011-2012 Staff Writer for Lantern Review.

For a look at Jai's "Fan Christy" Karaoke project, click here.
And the "Tom/Trans/Thai" trailer here.
For even more, look here:

Jai's interest in the body, the multi-voiced, the non-conforming, that which crosses genre and queers categories of all kinds is very exciting and I look forward to reading and seeing more of Jai's work.

Next up was Margaret Rhee who read to us from a piece in progress that discusses two writers who have been important in Rhee's development as a poet. She cited both Fred Moten and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Rhee also made reference to Timothy Yu's amazing book (which I thoroughly enjoyed) Race and the Avant-Garde. Jai might also have mentioned Yu. Rhee noted her desire to move toward a more queer, more discomforting understanding of APIA poetry and suggested Yu was an example of someone headed in this direction.

Eileen Tabios began her talk by explaining that she is someone who tries not to criticize what others say about her work, whether she agrees with their interpretations or not. She noted that she traffics in capitalist kitsch and is interested in aesthetic attempts that seek to widen the boundaries. Tabios also said that some elliptical poetry which marks ethnicity gets categorized and exoticized as avant-garde. In her own work, Tabios noted she wants to write from a more archetypal place, one that might be understood through the image of an indigenous Filipino figure of a human with one hand raised, a figure that when viewed from a particular perspective appears to be connected both to earth and sky. Here the human is understood as connected to all; here there is no unfolding of time. "No one or nothing is alien to me" said Tabios. The avant-garde, she suggested, separates and in its very terms leaves something behind for something else. Tabios does not want to have to discard or leave behind anything. Tabios showed us a piece of artwork by Jenifer K. Wofford entitled "MacArthur Nurses" that she sees as achieving what she herself seeks in art and in her own work.

In this work, Tabios sees Filipino nurses figured as an avant-garde of the Filipino diaspora. She pointed out how the nurses are not presented as individuals but the many.

Eileen has published her presentation from this event. You can find it here

Jean Vengua was the penultimate presenter. Jean, as her blog tells us, has taught at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Gavilan College. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Prau, and a chapbook, The Aching Vicinities. With Mark Young, she co-edited the First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. In the mid 1990s, Elizabeth H. Pisares and Jean Vengua formed Tulitos Press and published and edited the Debut: the Making of a Filipino American Film by Gene Cajayon and John Manal Castro, and The Flipside, by Rod Pulido. Her poetry and essays have been published in many journals and anthologies. She currently lives and works in Elkhorn, CA, near Salinas.

Jean shared some of her work, from her book Prau , or it might have been from Diario. She also discussed her current project working with U.S. Filipino periodicals. Again, her blog provides a helpful context. Jean's website explains:

Commonwealth Cafe.info focuses on U.S. Filipino periodicals in the early 20th century, their migrating communities of writers and editors, and their influence on the emerging “Filipino American literature” (as it would later be called by the post-WWII generation of writers). The research reflects my interest in recovering U.S. Filipino literary heritage. Denise Enck, multi-talented writer and webdesigner, designed the site. The website is accompanied by a blog of the same name.

Jean discussed her interest in using what she called both the dreaming language of poetry and the utilitarian language of the newspaper.

Lastly, Truong Tran began his talk by saying that he was unprepared, explaining that of late he has been doing work with his hands rather than language. On his blog, Truong explains his current project The Lost and Found:

A Day In The Life

On days when I am not working as a poet and teacher, I try to wake up early. I empty my oversized messenger bag of books and papers and the previous day's half-eaten lunch. I place the strap over my left shoulder, with the bag firmly secured to my back. I begin to walk. I walk for as long as it takes to fill the bag with stuff: branches, findings from the local thrift stores, choice items left in boxes on sidewalks and, if I'm lucky, something I've never seen before. Once the bag is filled, I return home, empty the contents from the bag, creating mounds of what some might consider piles of junk. I see them as source materials and the beginnings to my art making process.

I am committed to using these recycled materials as an environmentally conscious artist but also as an artist who strives to make art accessible through both its practice and use of materials. Quite frankly, I get a kick out of forcing these disparate objects to come together, compromising and accommodating one another in their process of becoming something new, something beautiful.

I refer to what I do as art making because I do not paint, draw or sculpt in a traditional or learned consideration of artistic craft. My craft is founded in the doing. I glue things together. I make things fit. I dip things in wax. I cut. I build. I weave. I think. I fill things up with paint using ketchup bottles. I stare at things in hopes that these things will talk back to me. This is what I do. It makes me happy. It allows me to lose myself in the process of doing. It makes me sad. It allows me to find myself in the process of seeing.

Truong did discuss a current writing project that entails returning to earlier work, specifically his first book with the goal of erasing otherness from the book. He noted that this project strikes some people as deeply problematic but that he sees it as empowering. He is contemplating the design of the book, using a French fold, with the text black-lined on the outside, a design requiring people to cut open the book to get to the language that remains on the inside.

He then read something from Placing the Accents that when erased is transformed into "Placate."

All in all, a great, chilly Sunday afternoon in the Mission with engaging discussion after panel presentations which, sadly, I cannot reproduce here.

12.14.2011

Saturday, December 10th found me at work on the main first floor reference desk at the San Francisco Public Library from 10-2 where I fielded questions about Laughing Sal, Bergman's Fanny & Alexander, and books about Russian spies while also watching numerous Santas troop in and out of the library's bathrooms. They were part of "Santacon," a pub crawl for people who, for some unfathomable reason, enjoy dressing up in holiday Chris Kringle attire.

Then, off to a book party for Kathleen Fraser's newly published and lovely book movable TYYPe from Nightboat Books in New York. Hosted by Hazel White, the gathering was a pleasure. Jennifer Scappettone, Denise Newman, Susan Gevirtz, Steve Dickison, Bob Gluck, Peter Weltner, Michael Cross, Eleni Stecopoulos, Steven Gilmartin, Jamie Robles, and many others were in attendance. Kathleen read a generous selection from her book, about which Bob Gluck has written:

Kathleen Fraser never takes a short cut. In movable TYYPE she asks again, What can a poem be and do?--hanging words in the sky, opening the process collaboratively, turning the page into an environment, an installation. Intimacy is wedded to space and abstraction, and form itself is only a holding place in this spinning world. Her formal eclecticism becomes an expression of the mutability of life "in language under erosion."

Sometimes music takes the lead, "ear hinged forward." Fraser's musical syllables are not so much wrested from silence as they are examples of abundance, of fugal expectation. She casts into the world, tries it on: discomfort and pleasure, balance and awkwardness, trust and mistrust, presence and absence. The poems are not reduced essences but the multiplication of precise choices, including the typographic.

Fraser privileges attention a a gesture outward, even an offering. Precision becomes its own kind of emotion, a longing to be united with the world, to be carried up and held in the infinite patterning, and in that sense these poems are gestures toward connection and union (back cover R.Gluck).

Jennifer Scappettone writes:

Through the pull of collaboration with other artists and with the hours, hours' orologic, crossing languages and species of remoteness, Fraser's movable TYYPE searches time's keening in a material proliferation of Ys as the light (or bakelite shadow) from new coasts of Rome, observed, curves the march of extinction toward rescue instead: in lines exuberant, vigilant and cutting, recovering horizons of disappeared time with the hands (back cover J.Scappettone).

Entitled "20th Century," the first is comprised of the following pieces: "Orologic," "The Disappeared," "A whodunit, for Barbara Guest," "20th Century," and "Alice's shoe." The second section consists of Four Artist Books, texts in collaboration" --and a thrid section includes new work.

Signaling pleasure, play, and attention to language's materiality, the titles of pieces and sections in the book are an invitation to the curious reader. And while the economics of book publishing and the prohibitive costs of color reproduction prevent the visual art from appearing with Fraser's writing, the book does not disappoint. movable TYYPE includes a big chunk of work produced in collaboration with Hermine Ford, JoAnn Ugolini, Gonzalo Tena, and Nancy Tokar Miller. Fraser uses cut-ups, found material, journal responses and a generous receptivity to error to re/work, re/think meaning, relation, scale, perception. I love how Fraser's interest in "extending the graphics of typography," is enabled by an interesting practice of sustainability. By this I mean, she finds a way to return to writing that earlier she'd given "up [on] and filed...away" (172), only to return to it anew "for the pleasure of re/finding the meanings which had compelled me on a scale of arbitrariness." About hi dde violeth i ddde violet, Fraser writes:

I worked non-stop, using every word, letter and punctuation mark in the original and static text. This meant doubling-up on some vowels or consonants and allowing intentional misspellings, the product of which quickly absorbed me in its inventive possibilities. I ended up with 31 texts that I hung--happily--along one wall of my study and invited an audience of 2 to "view" (172).

Looking for a deeply satisfying reading that will urge you to the page? Fraser's movable TYYPE is the book for you.

Swiftly, then,

I scooted home to help my teenage daughter Alex with some review for final exams before heading out, a slice of pizza in mouth, to the Poetry Center's Oppen Memorial Lecture, featuring Peter Nicholls who dazzled all of us with his reading of impoverishment as a formal and political strategy in Oppen's poetics.

The Poetry Center features the following summary of Nicholls' central concern:

In one of his later poems, Oppen speaks of poetic language as, ideally, something "impoverished // of tone of pose." The lecture asks what might constitute a political poetry in a social order in which a literal condition of impoverishment obtains, and how in refusing to adopt any kind of "pose," a poet might provide an adequate answer to that question. (Peter Nicholls)

It is impossible to capture the outline even of Peter's engaging argument, but I've noted down some bits and pieces here:

Nicholls situated Oppen's mobilization of impoverishment by way of Celan, Beckett, Leo Bersani, Robert Duncan, Bernard Buffet, Roland Barthes, and others. I was intrigued by Nicholls referencing Bernard Buffet's painting "Pieta" as an example of an art of impoverishment grounded in social reality.

I think Nicholls was suggesting that Buffet and Oppen share similar projects. We heard Oppen's poem: ﻿

SONG, THE WINDS OF DOWNHILL

'out of poverty
to begin

again' impoverished

of tone of pose that common
wealth

of parlance Who
so poor the words

wouldwithand take on substantial

meaning handholds footholds

to dig in one's heels sliding

hands and heels beyond the residential
lots the plots it is a poem

which may be sung
may well be sung (Selected Poems 129)

Reading "Song, The Winds of Downhill," Peter pointed out that Oppen here begins by quoting Charles Simic's poem "White" (which you can read here) and from there went on to discuss the tension between poetry and politics in Oppen's work and life--given the well known fact of his hiatus from writing, or at least publishing, for 25 years while the Oppens were politically active and then for a period, living in Mexico.

Exploring Oppen's dialectic negotiation of Marxism and existentialism, Nicholls suggests that for Oppen, poetry must recover something to stand on, for being in the world and being political, which is, for Oppen, a mode of social being. Predicated on a "social vision" rather than a dogmatic politics, a poetics of impoverishment enables Oppen to work within the impossible confines of discourse which is already always being absorbed in order to test what a poem can do, even if failure underwrites it all.

We also read a portion of Oppen's poem, "The Book of Job and a Draft of a Poem to Praise the Paths of the Living," a poem written "in memory of Mickey Schwerner," one of three civil rights workers killed by the Klan in Mississippi. Schwerner had lived with or rented a room in the Oppen's home. Part of what Nicholls focused on here is Oppen's resistance to enabling some kind of easy identification with the victims as well as the poem's formal and tonal impoverishment, Oppen's refusal of metaphor (in particular places, I think) as an act of negativity.

In the question/answer session after the talk, Michael Davidson suggested that what Nicholls was describing might be related to Adorno's negative dialectics. In response, Nicholls suggested that in Oppen there is more optimism for Oppen seeks a kind of plenitude, but situates it on a different ground, in dialectic, in which nothing is left behind.

From The Poetry Center, here's a bit about Peter Nicholls and some interesting quotes both from and about Nicholls' work:

PETER NICHOLLS is Professor of English at New York University, where me moved in 2009 after many years at the University of Sussex in Great Britain. His publications, that emphasize connections between American and European poetry, and the political and economic dimensions of literary works, include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing, Modernisms: A Literary Guide and George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, as well as many articles and essays on literature and theory. Nicholls co-edited with Laura Marcus The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature and with Gianni Cianci Ruskin and Modernism. He is US editor of Textual Practice, and lives in New York City.

“Oppen’s allusion to Blake... — ‘I must make no system, or I will be enslaved by another man’s’ — reflects his late fascination with Blake’s grasp of a vivid ‘actuality’ and his handling of the ‘little words’ in the Songs of Innocence and Experience: ‘Blake’s Tyger in the small words. They burn. The nouns are the visible universe, the night sky burning’. This ‘burning’ is the force of disclosure and revelation — the blazing forth of the ‘actual’ — but it is also, for Oppen as for Blake, a light which both illuminates and destroys, much as the divine creation gives birth to both the tiger and the lamb (‘One had not thought / To be afraid // Not of shadow but of light’.)...”

—Peter Nicholls, from George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

“…the biography Nicholls is most interested in is not the record of the external events of Oppen's life, but the narrative of his intellectual and poetic development, and it's here that George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism proves itself most valuable. Simply put, as an account of the development of Oppen's poetics and of the influences on his thought, and as a series of illustrative readings of some of his most important poems, Nicholls's book is an exemplary piece of scholarship.” —Mark Scroggins

12.11.2011

On December 4th, 2011, Small Press Traffic continued its look back at the Bay Area Poetry scene by revisiting the LeftWrite! Conference of 1981 organized by Steve Abbott, Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck and others. Attended by some 300 writers of diverse backgrounds and poetics, the Conference had the goal of building a coalition of writers from a variety of Leftist perspectives. The conference proved to be contentious; throughout it the participants wrestled over how to bridge their differences and work together though they consistently disagreed about the core issues of class, sexuality, and gender.

﻿﻿

Bob Gluck. Photo: Andrew Kenower

﻿﻿ Kaplan Harris began the evening by situating the Conference in its historical moment while he also described how it was organized, who did what, and then went on to outline the substance of the event. You can read his notes here. Bob Gluck and Bruce Boone each provided their own recollections and located the conference in the context of their lives and political and poetic commitments while also discussing the current Occupy movements. Providing a sense of the variety of people and voices, Bob read a series of quotes from a number of the participants. You can read these here. Bruce remarked upon the enormous generosity of all the Conference participants, while also noting "the great divide, like the Rocky Mountains" that lesbian, gay, and women's issues constituted against the backdrop of a continuing struggle between the Old and New Left. Bruce also referred to the homophobia that reared its ugly head, igniting anxiety, anger and fear. Both Bob and Bruce discussed how the conference organizers and participants attempted to answer the question: how do we maintain differences and yet work together? A Left Writers Union was established during the conference; however, the prioritization of class over all other frameworks for analyzing and responding to oppression ended up with many--including Gluck, Boone and Abbott--feeling frustrated and outraged with the project. The life experience of organizing a Left writers’ movement erupted into a fragmented and polarizing endeavor, as identity categories were plotted along a hierarchical structure

The LeftWrite! Conference constitutes an important moment in Bay Area literary and political history and it was a treat to get to hear Kaplan, Bob and Bruce talk about it.

Art is not a way out. There is no way out. There’s only what we’ve got and how to turn it around to reinforce our fighting genius. Judy Grahn

Just because Cuba isn’t advocating lesbianism or homosexuality, it’s because they’re trying to solve problems 100 times more acute and more important to the people. Aljendro Murguia

In the USA, when we say something takes time, it means we’re not going to do it. Robert Chrisman

The left has done its best to hide behind the skirts, or actually jockstraps, of patriarchy and has made a fetish out of “great men” to look up to. Ted Matthews.

“the single most common accusation made about left writing is that it’s rhetorical. In 1930’s magazines such as New Masses and Partisan Review, cultural analysis and political strategy were seen to be closely interrelated. ” David Plotke

Native American writers:

Wendy Rose: reviewers say they are not qualified to review this writing because they don’t have an anthology background. Bookstore put our novels in the anthropology department,

Also the juvenile section, in libraries too, as though they had to be kids stories.

[Bob's aside: just as they put mine in Human Sexuality, Gay Sexuality etc.]

Black writing

Sha’am Wilson Hayes

I see three basic resources for financial assistance. First is self-help. Second is “relative assistance” or assistance from your relatives. The third is manna from foundations which is of course rapidly drying up. There few new blooms in site, under the leadership of Shah Reagan.”

Discussion of how Black Nationalism and Lesbian Separatism have conservative elements. Discussion of black vs African American. “You try things out until they work”

A workshop on Translation as a Political Took against Poundism

A poem travels language to language and across time as common property, a portion of a greater text still to be elaborated, and “otherness that fecundates the commonplace, a translation turns us toward the original and beyond. A process that of both paraphrase and invention, it modifies the metabolism of the imagination, the earth’s intangible tilt. Michael Kotch

The question is not whom to translate but how. Do you want to preserve the cultural uniqueness of the poem or do you want to make it understood in San Francisco. Somewhere the potatoes is common, elsewhere it may be a luxury. Woman with German accent

There hasn’t always been an opportunity to read works by women of color. In some bookstores I still see their books in the “race” section separated from the woman’s section. Gabrielle Daniels

There is a moneyed establishment that feels if you write about El Salvador it’s not feminist writing but if you write about Tampax it is. Unidentified woman.

Discussion of new technologies as a means of publication.

Fewer podiums, more dialogue.

I see the cassette tape recorder as a lethal weapon. Vanguards of us should go out with radio cassette players and play some consciousness. Kush

Well, native people got poems from other planets. David Moe

In 1947 the California Labor School conducted the last conference in San Francisco like this one. But the school and the movements it launched was smashed by McCarthyism. What we are here today for is to make sure we are not smashed by Reaganism.” William Mandel.

This is one of the most exciting days of my life as a writer. Ron Silliman

We live in a class society. There is a bourgeoisie, lumpen proletariat and distinctions between peasants and intellectuals. RV Cottam

She found it odd that sexuality and the Soviet Union were the cutting edges of the conference and felt, therefore, gays and lesbians needed to rethink their relationships to the Left. Amber was more convinced now that ever we have to maintain autonomous movements or we’d be lost.

An unhealthy dose of militaristic politics both east and west has created a milieu of transfigured decadence, lunatic humor and bizarre behavior that defies American Tradition. It is an encircled phenomena with its roots in dada, futurism of fascistic Italy, constructivism of revolutionary Russia, surrealism, nihilism, anarchism, and film noir of Hollywood in the thirties. Richard Irwin

30 years ago, Christian Fundamentalism was creating a monolithic message-controlled media empire using the very tools of technology that had previously been seen as signs of a godless modernity. 30 years ago advocates of social programs were besieged again and again by the red baiting of Cold War rhetoric. 30 years ago the film Cruising brought audiences the silver screen fantasy of a serial killer who targeted gay men in S&M bars of New York. 30 years ago Kramer vs. Kramer swept the Academy Awards after it dramatized the changing gender roles wrought by second-wave feminism – never mind that the show's host that year, Johnny Carson, mocked President Carter in front of his live television audience for the ongoing Iranian hostage crisis. 30 years ago a secretarial revenge fantasy called 9-5 was the second-highest grossing movie. But 30 years ago adventure stories about white men dominated weekend box office returns: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, Escape from New York, and yet another installment in the James Bond 007 saving the world from communists.

30 years ago Thatcher and Reagan were swept into office by a wave of free market ideology that dominated economic superpowers of the West. 30 years ago an army of conservative think tanks and industry lobbyists were hard at work preaching the virtues of privatization. 30 years ago during the first year of his administration Reagan nominated Milton Friedman to his Economic Policy Advisory Board. 30 years ago the Reagan and Thacker administrations launched an all-out coordinated attack on labor and social welfare programs that had been established since the 1930s. 30 years ago was the moment that Paul Harvey has called the "turning point" in neoliberalizing of the U.S. economy.

30 years ago Time magazine named Ayatullah Khomeini its Man of the Year. Ronald Reagan won the honor the following year. 30 years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger won Mr. Olympia for the fifth and final time. 30 years ago IBM introduced the IBM PC. 30 years ago computer geeks were on the rise. 30 years ago the mystery of who shot J.R. was solved. 30 years ago John Lennon was murdered. 30 years ago the start of the fall television season was delayed by a 3-month strike of the Screen Actors Guild. 30 years ago Derrida published The Post-Card (1980), Foucault wrote his history of sexuality, and the Oakland Raiders won the Super Bowl (in January of the new year). 30 years ago when the clock was ticking down to the start of a pandemic that would be called AIDS. And 30 years ago gay bashing and anti-feminism were very much part of the American vernacular.

Changes in the culture. Change in the political economy. Where would the battle be fought?

And then introduced the conference:

It was against the backdrop of these events that Steve Abbott and Bruce Boone organized the LeftWrite Unity Conference at the Noe Valley Ministry in February 1981. Their goal was to bring together diverse writers with heterogeneous, often competing aesthetic agendas. In imagining a more democratic, inclusive agenda for the Left, the conference was far ahead of its time. There were workshops for “Radical Asian-American Writing," “The Political Impact of Lesbian and Gay Writing,” "Translation as a Political Tool," "Native American Writing," and more. What today is sometimes called ecopoetry was the main topic of a workshop titled, "Take It To the Streets/Living Leaves of Grass." [Schedule] The conference steering committee was comprised of several familiar names: Robert Gluck (logistics), Bruce Boone & Denise Kastan (Finance), Steve Abbott (Agenda), John Mueller (Publicity). Denise Kastan was then the director of Small Press Traffic. Workshop coordinators: Robert Gluck, Wendy Rose, Deborah Major, Jack Hirschman, Ann Finger, Francisco X Alarcon, Ricardo Mendoza, Rosa de Anta, John Curl, Susu Jeffrey, Merle Woo, and Bruce Boone.]

The attendance numbers vary depending on the different accounts. Hilton Obenzinger wrote a conference report describing 250 attendees. Conyus wrote a conference report describing 150 people in the audience for the opening panel. He added, "There was a noticeable absence of blacks, Asians, and Latins present" (Conyus 91). Robert Glück has written about the conference. He recalls, “To our astonishment, three hundred people attended Left Write, so we accomplished on a civic stage what we were attempting in our writing, editing and curating: to mix groups and modes of discourse” (LN, 33).

§

The LeftWrite conference was visionary for mean reasons but not least because it brought these groups together under one big roof. In the decade before the conference, the different coalitions held many rallies and protests for their individual causes. The reading schedules and announcements in Poetry Flash can provide a brief survey:

February 1973 - Farmworkers Reading

March 1973 - Poetry Celebration for International Women's Day (at Jewish Community Center, SF)

March 1973 - Benefit reading for the People's Community School (at Berkeley Art Center)

8/31/1973 - Benefit Reading with Creeley and Kyger (Unitarian Church at Geary and Franklin)

11.30.2011

These three pieces are from Matt Longabucco's manuscript of poems written in the voice of Juan Garcia Madero, the 17-year-old Mexican-born narrator of parts 1 and 3 of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. In the novel, Madero's work appears to be lost.

Last August at Bard College, I heard Matt read from this manuscript and invited him to send me some work for xpoetics, and he gaciously agreed. Gracias Matt!

All Shook Up

The troglodyte in leathers,
the cartes de visite in the library display case,
the strange action of balloons in drafty rooms,
the rust on the car’s white paint job
that makes the machine-nature of the car
overpower its beast-nature,
the poem that can never be written—
the one called “Teens on the Beach.”

To share my thoughts with others
in this odd, frankly historical way
is bliss. Four-times-folded pages.
People who don’t know when to shut up,
or who seem insensible to their own slightly
bad odor, fill me with tenderness (after all—
my beastly odor, yesterday),
but it’s a tenderness I must nevertheless
go home and stub out
like a cigarette
in a dish.

Do not go inside police stations or lawyer dens,
do not bathe in public fountains
till after midnight,
do not snatch up the beautiful children
in the square to augment the audience
at your poetry reading or workshop,
do not tell someone they stopped making
sense an hour ago just as they reach
the climax of their murderous harangue.

I can take a pounding,
emotionally, and have learnt to grasp
from the spine, like a creature.
I don’t mind fucking up my good looks
with drugs and sleep deprivation
and lack of proper nutrition.
As if I were not already invisible,
like the man in Kierkegaaard
who leaves no footprints.

Five Finger Discount

He evinced a vast multiplicity
as safeguard against ironic twists.
What a mentor, degenerate, and friend.
I his subaltern and pet cricket.
When you steal away what do you steal?
Getting high in the field, close
to the ancient places, those chakras
of the earth, and feeling nothing,
not the surprised plaintive nothing of the tourist,
nor the resolved bemused nothing of the commandant,
but the nothing of a child at a funeral,
or the nothing of a prostitute
whose sadness before the act is the sadness
of freedom, the freedom to arrange sprigs
of blossom in a peaceful room,
a room of almost Swedish calm and proportion,
in the world wrapped around this one,
torus-shaped world,
the very one Socrates stands in the courtyard
visiting, in the Symposium, and even though
dinner’s ready they don’t dare call him in.
I spent the day reaching out to others,
but the slogans stood between us
like a cheval de frise,
and even in the mirror of the puddles
the slogans, and even on the legends
of city buses the slogans,
not the radio ads of the true poet
Robert Desnos but the slogans
of the pitiless cigarette-strewn streets,
the atom bomb for
atom-bomb junkies, look,
there are some things worse than atom-
bombs, there are neighborhoods so bad
even atom-bombs won't drop on them,
because the motherfuckers there
will steal anything and will steal
the atoms right out of an atom bomb,
though what on earth could they want with them
but they do. Then drifting back,
together, to the outskirts, the arm’s-length
of the city, and someone: the maxim:
limit your wanting to what your arm
can reach. Trying to maintain.
I couldn’t eat a thing, thanks.
I’m sick with health, whichever philosopher
proclaimed moisture the element of the world
is the one you’d want to date.
In the park two girlfriends held hands,
so skinny their socks were loose,
heads together shooting out a bolt of laughter,
and an old lady on a bench looking like
“That’s the way it is.” “The world
is for consciousness” says Unamuno,
but the stain of enthusiasm is on it,
like sticking your face under the water
running from the jagged mouth
of the great gaping corrugated drainpipe
where it empties into the trench
and drinking some.

The Hunters

Are watchers alive?
Depends: what do the living talk about?
In the café, in the daytime
or else at night,
I heard that unruly friend of mine—
who loves me, or doesn’t—
discourse, in shredded voice,
upon the nature of a virtue
she felt sure we’d all dismiss as merely quaint,
it being neither insight nor stamina nor political engagement
but trust,
trust even among,
and here her fork quivered in the plausible
and thunder shook the windows
and rain spattered the glass like blood
from a cut jugular,
even or especially among the friends assembled there,
trust that makes time as real as concrete pouring,
trust that leaves all parties to it exposed
like, what else could she say,
like vaginas,
those organs of trust
for which trust is a flowering,
and everyone’s face flushed, like labia,
and drinking drinks wondered what,
in 20 years, would become of the assembly
or more correctly of the bonds that joined them,
bonds that already seemed, this day or night,
as fragile as spiderwebs,
and when finally they all turned to me I realized
I was the one caught,
and when confronted would I reveal
that an act waits caged within me
like a half-crazed wild boar?

Matt Longabucco’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Clock, With+Stand, Painted Bride Quarterly, Conduit, Pleiades, and WashingtonSquare.He teaches writing and literature in the Liberal Studies Program at New York University, and co-curates the POD reading series in Park Slope.He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.

11.23.2011

Last Sunday, November 20, 2011, Timken Hall at the California College of Arts was plenty full as eight of the ten Grand Piano authors, including Barrett Watten, Ted Pearson, Tom Mandel, Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, and Carla Harryman, participated in a group discussion moderated by David Buuck. Sadly, Bob Perelman and Ron Silliman were not in attendance.

photo: Camille Roy

I walked in a bit late and so missed the framing for the discussion that David provided, but the audience was very much interested in talking about the Occupy movements and asked a number of related questions. Joshua Clover started off with a question that set up a reflection on the social movements of 1968 and the Occupy movements, asking if the current moment was less theoretico-critical. He also pondered the relation between political projects and representation. Barrett responded that the Grand Piano moment was all about non-representational strategies and Kit discussed the very different economic conditions that prevailed in '68 and into the 70s, noting that it was somewhat easier to live with less then than it is now. Carla challenged Kit's premise, saying that some people were indeed worried about money and health care, etc.

Various people in the audience noted the Occupy movements' absence of celebrity, of someone acting as a representative of the movement, and how this very lack, along with the absence of unifying or singular narratives (as pointed out by Camille Roy) is serving the movement well while confounding the media and others. They don't know how to "read" or respond to the rhizomatic nature of the Occupy movements.

Somewhere along the line, Carla cited Adorno's "Let no one represent you!"

Carla also mentioned Steve McCaffery's 1985 Poetics Journal article (for the special Non-Narrative issue) entitled "And Who Remembers Bobby Sands?" and his exploration of the resulting problematics when resistance is located in one person, one body.

Tom Mandel pointed out the power of "not making demands" as a tactic when the making of demands has continually failed.

The conversation also focused on other differences between "then" and "now," including how in the 70s people were rethinking Marxist constructions of class and the tremendous importance of theoretical literature from Europe and elsewhere finding its way to the US in the form of translations and publications of the work of Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin. Carla noted that on the train to San Francisco State, you would see everyone reading Barthes' S/Z and how incredible it was that so many people were reading the same thing simultaneously. Something was in the air. Barrett said that Badiou and Rancière were not having as momentous an impact now.

There were questions and discussion about community, collectivity, collaboration.

I asked about the question of form re the Grand Piano, as compared to an earlier multi-authored article ( the 1988 "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto” from the journal Social Text, co-authored by Silliman, Harryman, Hejinian, Benson, Perelman, and Watten) and the way the Social Text article refrained from demarcating individual "authors," whereas the Grand Piano preserves the individual and includes a larger set of them (and could have included others). I am interested in the practical, formal, and political implications of these choices.

Carla noted that the earlier article was written collectively by people who were in the same physical location and so the process of writing enabled a collectivity; with the Grand Piano project this was physically impractical since now everyone is dispersed, many living in different parts of the country.

Lyn noted the Grand Piano's attempt to be "anti-monolithic (emphasizing parts rather than any totality or whole)," articulating that "the modular character of it (so that order of appearance changed with each volume) should suggest the possibility of other orders and other ways of ordering," enabling remixes. Such a structure, someone said, shows that not everyone was "singing the same song," In this way, no ONE person or volume represented "Language Writing."

Another audience member--Kate ?-- talked about the poetics of the human mic and its usage in the Occupy movements. David Buuck noted the human mic's association with collective speech, with Quakerism, and consensus building. He noted the "poetics of enjambment on the spot" it engenders, and he and Kate highlighted the somatics of taking the words of another into one's body, words that one might not agree with, but that one nevertheless takes into one's body and, rather than merely repeating, projects them onward. Joshua reminded people, though, that Zizek had shown up at Zuccotti Park and projected his "speech" or talk via the human mic and thus corrupted its rhizomatic quality.

Barrett wondered if the human mic was "post-memic"?

Eirik Steinhoff talked about the human mic being like Gertrude Stein's becoming genius, her "at the same time talking and listening." Someone else in the audience described the human mic as "non-mechanical reproduction."

The conversation was lively and engaged and everyone participated though I have not quite captured that here. Memory is a faulty thing and note-taking in the dark a challenge! Any misquotes are my own.

The panel then transitioned to a scripted performance in which each person read various selections from writing that appeared in the ten volumes of The Grand Piano. The performance was orchestrated. There was polyphony, overlap, chorus and solos, and perhaps even improvisation, a reading that formally and performatively marked the individual and collective porosity of the conversation that is the text and the lives of all involved.

You can read my take on the first volume of The Grand Piano entitled "Hive and/or the Dark Body of Friendship: A Response to The Grand Piano Volume 1," at HOW2

11.15.2011

Sunday, November 6, 2011 Small Press Traffic continued its Fall 2011 focus on Bay Area poetry history with an event celebrating the life and work of Steve Abbott--writer, editor, hippie, political activist, cartooner, gay father, and all around rabble rouser. Abbott co-edited Poery Flash (from 1979-1984) and produced and edited 4 issues of the influential SOUP magazine. He was the first person to use the term New Narrative to describe the work of Bay Area writers Robert Gluck and Bruce Boone and he organized the historic Left Write conference in 1981. Alysia Abbott, Steve's daughter and muse/accomplice (and now writer herself) shared a moving collection of photos, writings, and anecdotes from Steve's life.

RTM & Alysia Abbott
photo: Camille Roy

The afternoon began with an overview from me as I recounted my accidental encounter with Steve's work, how in the course of researching the Bay Area poetry scene in the 70s-80s, Steve's name came turning up.

The written record convinces me that Steve Abbott was an integral and important force in the Bay Area writing scene in the late 70s and into the 80s.

In his tenure as the co-editor of Poetry Flash, Steve was not afraid to take on controversy, to provide an arena for engaging in debates about the pressing questions of the time. Steve seems to have had an uncanny ability to read the contemporary even though as Gertrude Stein wrote,

Everybody is contemporary with his period….and the whole business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness….The thing that is important is that nobody knows what the contemporariness is. In other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way.

As the editor of SOUP, Steve was on his way and seemed to have the ability to see that it was worth tracking some of the most exciting contemporary writing that was “on its way.” New Narrative found a home in SOUP as did Language Writing, including Bob Perelman's poem "China." (See Jacket Magazine here for Rob Halpern's insightful account of this important context.) Steve produced a number of special issues of Poetry Flash, including those on West Coast Black Writing (September 1979), American Indian Poets of California (October 1980), profiles of Helen Adam and a spotlight on the Grand Piano reading series (February 1981), Gay Writing (March 1981), and a focus on Poets Theater (November 1982).

In addition to running reading series, producing cartoons and journals, parenting, and more, Steve wrote a number of books including: Wrecked Hearts, Stretching the Agape Bra, The Lizard Club, Lives of the Poets, Holy Terror, Skinny Trip to a Far Place, and others. My favorite is the 1989 View Askew: Postmodern Investigations, a book that collects Steve's essays from The San Francisco Sentinel, The Advocate, Mirage, and elsewhere. In it, Steve ruminates about life in the US, in the Bay Area, from the 70s and into the 80s; the book “documents the blurring of boundaries I’ve seen since moving to San Francisco in 1973” (Preface). It consists of three sections: Sexual Panic and the Arts, Mixed Messages in Daily Life, and Alternative Lives; and an epilogue about AIDS and the future entitled “Will We Survive the 80s?” The book also discusses performance art, Barbie dolls, phone sex, Stonestown, Kyoto condoms, commercialism (in an article in which he mentions angry protesters bombing the Bank of America (75)I might add!); he writes about such various artists and writers as Robert Arneson, Steve Benson, Julian Schnabel, Bob Kaufman, Judy Grahn, Diamanda Galas, Odilon Redon, and New Narrative writers Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, and also Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker. I highly recommend it.

﻿﻿

Steve at the Jardins des Plantes 1991

﻿﻿ The question--will we survive the 80s?--was an urgent one. AIDS was devastating the gay community and the Bay Area generally. While Tom Clark and Ed Dorn created the "AIDS Awards for Poetic Idiocy" in the 1980s and "awarded," or rather, targeted Steve Abbott with one of these, Abbott in his epilogue in View Askew wrote:

To fight AIDS and the conditions that threaten us we need more than scientific research, more than money, more than leadership. We need to rethink America's spiritual, political, social and cultural systems at the most fundamental root level. How do we use power? How do we use language? It is clear that what we are doing now--as bosses and workers, as men and women, as gays and straights, as whites and nonwhites--is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth's ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that today we can no longer afford to see anything--as a separate issue needing a separate cultural, political or spiritual agenda (173-74).

There's more to say about Steve and there was lots more said on Sunday. Kevin Killian read selections from Steve's work and Bruce Boone and Bob Gluck (via a letter read by Alsysia) shared some writing about Steve. Bruce noted Steve's childlike and vulnerable qualities, his nagging, mentioning how Steve introduced Bruce to George Bataille, a writer who would become very important both to Bob Gluck and Bruce. Bob noted that Lives of the Poets is his favorite of Steve's books, one that he and Bruce published in 1987 as part of their Black Star Series. Bob wrote that "...more than any of us, Steve was the exemplary New Narratrive writer, maybe because his Buddhism allowed him to empty without violence both fiction and lived experience."

It was a lovely afternoon with a standing room only crowd and Alysia Abbott held the crowd with her photos and stories of Steve's amazing life, a life that Alysia was made an integral part of--her work appeared in SOUP, she was taken to the One World Poetry Festival in Amsterdam and hung out with Richard Brautigan and had tea with William Burroughs. And when Steve was very sick with AIDS, Alysia returned from a life in Paris to take care of Steve until he died at the Hartford Street Zen Center.

I eagerly await the publication of Alysia Abbott's memoir Fairyland. Here's an excerpt she has generously shared with us.

from FAIRYLAND

My father was a rich man in Paris. In San Francisco we skimped and saved. No piece of furniture was bought new, everything found at garage sales or at a markdown somewhere, as were his clothes. But in Paris my father was loose with his Francs, buying me any blouse or dress that caught my fancy. “I like to see you in nice clothes,” he’d tell me as I posed and turned in front of the shop mirrors. We went out every night and he barely looked at the check before spreading his money like monopoly money across the tabletop.

And what he didn’t spend that week of his visit, he put in an envelope and handed to me before taking a cab to catch his flight home. There was a feeling that We’re in Paris. This world is not our world. This is not real money. Why worry? Let’s let the money go.

We met for a coffee at Place d’Abbesses in Montmartre his first afternoon in the city. I explained to him how it was cheaper to take a coffee at the bar than to sit at a table. I still was tight with money, still used to being a student. But he wanted to sit. His legs were tired. He was easily tired that trip. So we sat outside on the terrace. The summer sun was shining so every other seat on the terrace was taken. The cobblestone streets were stacked with parked motos, the vespas the young Parisians liked to drive, their high-pitched engines echoing through the narrow alleys and hills. We sat at Café d’Abbesses across from a blinking merry-go-round. The trees were in bloom. The air warmed me and I felt good.

Our plan was to walk up to Sacré-Coeur but Dad didn’t know if he was up for the hills and many flights of stairs. “It’s not far from here,” I said splitting a cube of sugar for my espresso. He sat tapping the saucer of his café crème with his narrow cigarette stained fingers.

“That’s okay,” he said.

I suggested we go to Musée d’Orsay, my favorite Paris museum the next day. That semester I’d studied 19th Century history and the realists Flaubert and Balzac. I enjoyed seeing the art of that period against the literary and historical context I now knew so well.

“That’s okay,” he said.

He’d already seen Musée d’Orsay. Just as he’d already seen Notre Dame and Musée Picasso and Place des Vosges and everywhere else I suggested we visit.

“I’ve seen them all,” he said then, after a pause added, “I’m here to see you.”

He spoke his words calmly as he sipped on his café crème. And for a moment I felt uncomfortable just as many times in my life, my father’s love left me feeling uncomfortable. The way, at thirteen, I reacted to him grinning at me with big eyes from across the dinner table: “What are you smiling at?” And he responded, “I’m just amazed that I’ve raised this beautiful young woman.”

His love surprised me. It could be jarring, because it always seemed to spring from nowhere, and certainly seemed to have no relationship to my actions. It was as though he loved me just for sitting there in front of him, before his eyes and returning his gaze, listening to him and speaking.

This was how he looked at me that day at the cafe. It was too easy. (Alysia Abbott)

Bruce Boone
photo: Camille Roy

Kevin Killian
photo: Camille Roy

Alysia Abbott’s writing can be found at Time Out, Salon, and Babble and in essays about her relationship with Steve Abbott on Atlantic.com and in two anthologies: Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing up with Lesbian, Gay and Transgendered Parents, St. Martin’s Press (2000) and Only Child, Random House (2006). Abbott also maintains a web site about Steve here.

Thanks to Alysia Abbott, Kevin Killian, Bruce Boone, Bob Gluck, Jim Brashear for technical assistance, Kush, Samantha Giles of Small Press Traffic, and to all who came out for this event.

Stay-Tuned: Thirty years after the LeftWrite Conference: December 4th Kaplan Harris will talk with LeftWrite Conference organizers, Bruce Boone and Robert Glück to revisit some of the motivations, fractures and legacies of this seminal moment in Bay Area History.

11.06.2011

Friday night at the Green Arcade in San Francisco Krupskaya Books celebrated the publication of two new books: Judith Goldman's l.b.; or, catenaries and Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerious Catullus. I missed it! However, I have the books and eagerly await time to dive into them. They are hefty tomes; Brown's book has 189 pages and Goldman's 212. They will make for winter reading.

In the meantime, here are some selections from each book, including what others have said about each.

First up, Judith Goldman:

Stop questioning my average

Like I can't even represent myself

Like jury duty I never ejaculate anti-socially

Judged by a jury of my fears

my congress in line-item defeated

my forest floor porn twitches

withholding---

thinks it's raising the dead

but Sclerical fidelity cannot be

reduced to facts

facts is timely and seems to imply
You can get the same effects

defendant
calls prosecutor
to its defense,

Are you my god

Whereas conventions down-boy
The tally, they argue

Paradise can be entered from the other side

Supposedly, Nobody tries that hard (106)

General Scholium: "In the Beginning"

In the beginning was the worm, long unstymied stomach

In the begged were the warm stigmata whittled in the stick
Innocently wagging a carrot
Intensive care bigged the hole, stuck. Ow, ow, my hamstring!
Unstringed, to crawl I chug, dressed up as

jocund company

I wandered lonely as a clod

These condensations slung

O'er my shoulder

We the pebble, formidable, soldier,
than onion's perfect domino
We connote wayfare to the wayfarer
We the altar-wafer leaving
no waifish soul unaltered
We the peephole look through ourselves securely to instablish there's just-us
We the peeping chick assure you how wee the peehole

By God! your bigotry's big!

This one goes out to the precedent
Got its claws in you

Likewse my, my, my

My cavalry got bogged down, the critters
Ain't fending for me no more

Send reinforcements but
don't last--

ounce-of-humanity yourself

Lost the manual, managed to do it
Manually, de
spit
e the manhole's unmanning
yes, yerr honor
yerr grave spit on me
sharing its curse, spitty

The concatenated series of poems in Judith Goldman's l.b. chart the narratives formed by texts of uniform density hanging freely from two fixed readings not in the same semantic line. On the one hand, the book dramatizes language under the regimes of contemporary communication--the protocols and phatics of privatized and publicly traded language--with all the false and inescapable sociality of networked media and commercial memoranda. On the other hand, the motivated material play of the signifier points to the paths of greatest resistance: chance, ludic laughter, and the recalcitrant residium of the body.

At the level of composition, l.b. is also a kind of catena patrum: a series of extracts from earlier writings, forming a commentary on some portion of scripture. Goldman's finely sutured microcollage of forms and phrases moves from Aristotle to Andy Warhol, Kathy Acker to William Wordsworth, Abu Ghraib to Thomas Wyatt. Where the traditional catena is also a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine, here the discrepant result is a more thoroughly, honestly, chronic text: not the false time of doctrine and tradition, but something more true to its own time, and to linguistic time itself.

From Brandon Brown:

This is from the section entitled "Sparrow":

43

Catullus is a poet with no job, so hoards mucho otium, makes it obvious there is the tablets: leisure, convening (so delicious!), writing verses about writing verses with his phallus on the door of a bar, etc. Ludic numbers that make young Victorian Latin students blush and not from too much wine. Not incensed, I do sense discrepancy about the sleep and the quiet and the limitlessness of the time Catullus has to hang with Licinus, trading licks (both verse-ish and tongue-ish.) If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I'm probably at work. Bummer patrol! Catullus in bed, his members post-poesy, half-dead like writing in a book. Dolors make him sweat, but it's for dollars I perspire and expire. No bombs drop on my head except incendiary malinheritance. Beware the bombs brought on by gum disease: too much wine, not enough otium. Beware of do. Beware of poor attendance at the play. (51)

an excerpt from 65

The sixty-fifth poem in the corpus of Catullus is addressed to his friend Hortalus.

The poem is in the vocative and is usually read as essentially epistolary, a letter to accompany a translation that Catullus has made of a poem by Callimachus. This work of translation has been incredibly difficult, because there is a crisis in the life of Catullus that has made prosody frustrating.

The crisis in the life of Catullus is that his brother is lying on the beach dead in Troy and a wave licks his little pale foot.

The death of this brother has made it impossible for him to "produce the sweet fruit of the Muses." As if prosody were a redemptive tactic against the total loss effected by death.

I find it interesting that Catullus, who remains associated with the anachronistic but persistent mode of the lyric, constructs a practice almost always including appropriation. Translation, and certainly as Catullus himself practices it, is an artwork of appropriation. And yet much of contemporary translation as much as contemporary works of appropriation purport to cancel the somatic vehicle for lyric material.

That is, the conventional picture of translation, in which the translator is invisible, which excludes her body from the scene of translation, does not suggest a space in which the translator's desire--or grief--can find any entry into the imporous mimetic activity they understand as "translation." (93)

The back of Brandon's book includes this unattributed piece:

Ever since the poems of Catullus were discovered in a wine cask in Verona in the 13th Century, translators have returned to them over and over, insisting on their continued relevance. These troubling poems have scandalized and delighted generations of readers in translation, as they apparently scandalized and perhaps delighted the literary coterie surrounding Catullus in pre-revolutionary Rome. Brandon Brown's The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus is a translation in which the decadent excesses of ascending Roman hegemony meet the decadent excesses of collapsing American domination. The meeting is staged as half confrontation, half party. And this confrontation/party monster goes down in the overdetermined and hyper-privileged site of translation: the translator's body. Instead of reduplicating what Lawrence Venuti calls the "translator's invisibility," Brown is all too visible, exposing himself in various costumes: abject hero, demonic oaf, pathetic provocateur, swaggy braggart. These poems exploit the specificity of times and places to their maximal debasement, so the Gods of ancient Rome can't be distinguished from Brad Pitt watching Avatar, finally. And such spectacular cultural force doesn't just live in the sky, but irrupts into this sustained act of interpretive reading. 'Imagine if Brad Pitt came to your wedding. No, seriously.' Dead serious and impossibly fraught, Catullus's poems lurch in the hallways of the social networks in which we live. The time just before the machines become part of our bodies. Dazzling and devastated.